A quite remarkable story has emerged about a PC adventure game from Majestic Studios called Limbo Of The Lost. It has, it is alleged, entirely lifted locations and art from at least five other games, apparently proven in a number of screenshots posted by GamePlasma yesterday. Oblivion seems the main target, along with Thief 3 and others. Because, hey, who bought those games? But this is a larger story of peculiarity.

The development of Limbo Of The Lost has been talked about for over a decade, the first announcement of its release finally appearing in 2006 when signed to G2 Games. The press release oddly chose to boast that it had been in development for more than ten years. A lot more than ten years if the following statement is true.

“Originally created as a graphical/text adventure game for the Atari ST and then a traditional point & click game for the Amiga CD32/A1600.”

Not too sure there were many text adventures for the ST kicking around in 1996. Nevermind that the A1600 wasn’t an Amiga model at all.

Skip ahead two years and the game has released the vaguest of releases via G2 at some point in 2008. According to Adventure Gamers,

“The game’s European release through G2 Games late last year resulted only in a few copies available through eBay or from a small Asian retailer, casting doubt about the legitimacy of the release.”

By 7th May, US publisher Tri Synergy announced that they would be publishing the game in N. America (including the feature, “Immersive (being there) sound effects”). As recently as the 5th June a teaser trailer was released, then swiftly replaced due to failing to meet ESRB regulations with this one:

Um, isn’t that Poser? And I’m not quite sure you can claim your pencil sketches are an “all star cast”. But the most stand-out part of this surely being the name of one of the characters, “Cranny Faggot”. What? Sure, we get the spoonerism. But WHAT?

You may wonder why we’ve not linked to Majestic Studio’s website. Well, that would be because it’s on GeoCities. It’s like there can be nothing about this story that isn’t brilliant. Anyway, it’s either been whipped down, or overloaded by the attention the plagiarism accusations have brought, and you can fail to look at here.

Right, so the best bit. The screenshots. We don’t want to take anything from GamePlasma, and their fantastic discovery, and they deserve the hits they’ll be getting for this story. So head over there to see the full selection. But below is my favourite.
Limbo Of The Lost:

Oblivion:

It gets better. Neogaf posters have been spotting loads more, including scenes that appear to be from Silent Hill 4, Painkiller and Return To Castle Wolfenstein, and screen decor from Diablo 2, while at Just Adventure someone has claimed spoken dialogue has been lifted from Rune. A JA poster also spotted this story about the motley crew behind the game.

RPS readers reckon they’ve spotted more similarities, including further Thief 3 nabs, Pirates of the Caribbean game FMV, and bits from Crysis, Spawn, BioShock, UT2004, and Baldur’s Gate, although we can’t verify any of them yet. Collect them all!

Note the addition of the skulls on the shelf. The skulls from Diablo 2.

Tri Synergy have responded, issuing a press release stating:

“Tri Synergy is just as shocked as everyone else is by the recent screenshot comparisons. At no point during our dealings with Majestic Studios up until the point that the comparison was first publicly made by a third party did we have any knowledge of these similarities. Additionally, Tri Synergy will discontinue distribution of Limbo of the Lost in both retail and online outlets.”

It’s impossible to imagine more won’t show up. We’re trying to get a copy to see what we can find. If you want to play at home, I’ve put all 76 available screenshots here, as a 20Mb zip.

For now, let’s finish with this quote from an interview with Majestic, as spotted by QT3.

Gordon: So have any more recent games influenced your current project?
Steve: The project is more influenced by film and literature rather than other games, we want the experience to be as original as possible and as such we have made a calculated effort to keep away from other games in the genre. Limbo of the Lost is an experience first and foremost, secondly wrapped up in a game media and genre.

Thanks to Michael for being the first to tip us off to this.

EDIT: I can confirm that it’s a real game – no hoax – and that it is a point and click adventure, with a loosely animated character superimposed on static screenshots.

ANOTHER EDIT: Courtesy of RPS reader Joachim, here’s a preview of Limbo of the Lost from the June 1995 issue of The One. Page 1 and Page 2.

I was thinking, “Is this a hoax” all the way through writing the story. Thing is, it’s on sale from Game in the UK, and those screenshots were posted by Majestic on GamesPress as long ago as 2006. Which makes it a really elaborate hoax if it is, and one I wouldn’t be embarrassed to fall for.

The odd thing is that they don’t even try to hide it. The seem to steal textures, models and architecture, and don’t even bother trying to mix them up slightly. Its not even like they’ve ripped of some obscure games that few people have ever played, Oblivion in particular is one of the biggest releases in the past few years.

Ohnotheydidn’t! And, man, Cranny Faggot? It’s like the kid in school that used to draw cocks in his exercise book and looked over your shoulder to cheat on tests grew up and got a job in games development.

“He said: “Everything just sort of fizzled out. Then one day I was working in a pub and Tim and Steve walked in.

“I joked ‘I thought you would be millionaires now’, and they replied ‘actually that is what we wanted to talk to you about'”.

The three put their heads together and after three more years of hard work Limbo of the Lost – a PC adventure game – was born. It is a battle between fate and destiny, with players having to work through a series of puzzles and challenges to reach the end.”

My favourite one is the rip from the motion picture Spawn. Taking screenshots of games and using them as backgrounds = very very bad. Ripping hollywood movies into your FMVs = completely mindnumbingly stupid.

Every time I visit another forum or site, someone has spotted another game that this title “borrowed” from. It seems like Majestic accidentally managed to great the most ground-breaking adventure meta-game of all time.

Here’s a couple tips for future thieves:
1. Pick games that haven’t sold millions of copies.
2. Put a little effort into hiding it’s origins. Leaving the same coat of arms on the wall is a no-no.

There’s no way it can be true, they superimposed player dude on screens or something, it looks lame with shadow always pointing the same direction etc. No one is that stupid and/or detached from reality to try to sell such ripfest.

Yes Jonathan, I do believe that the LOWER_REACHES_4_ is the shop in Thief 3, especially as on the shelves on the right of the picture there’s a practice lock for sale. Either best viral marketing ever or a massive case of stupid with the soon to come legal raping of the decade.

That first trailer’s got two or three cutscenes from the Pirates of the Caribbean game by Akella in it too.

Actually, this cinematics video for PotC has about 1/3 of the “Limbo of the Lost” trailer in it, including the waking up on the beach segment, all the stuff with ships basically and the crab-covered skeleton, which showed up every time you died in Pirates.

This may already be common knowledge, just about any site relating to this surreal story is totally swamped so i haven’t done too much investigating.

I can assure all of you that what you see is indeed true. My first instinct was the same thing that you guys have commented. “This must be a hoax or my writer photoshopped it” After I did my fact-checking, there was no denying this. I hope you guys have enjoyed the read!

With regards to it being a hoax, I don’t believe it is so. I’m guessing it’s one of those point ‘n clickers with pre-rendered backdrops and a rendered character and shadow. Like all modern low-budget P’nC games.

The 3d scene are so similar they must have used a straight 3d ripper like this one (http://www.deep-shadows.com/hax/3DRipperDX.htm)
I bet there so lazy they didn’t even bother to ‘recreate’ the scenes they ripped them straight into 3dmax with textures and everything.. now this is a billion times worse than piracy!